


Hard Reset

by dogmatix, flamethrower, norcumi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Amnesia, Anakin flails a lot, GFY, Gen, canon-type deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 14:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3532820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogmatix/pseuds/dogmatix, https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower, https://archiveofourown.org/users/norcumi/pseuds/norcumi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anakin Skywalker wakes up to his worst nightmare, and he doesn't even know all of it yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Anakin wakes up to red. Everything is tinted red, and somewhere a voice is speaking in that flat monotone of a medical droid, droning on about head injuries and asking him how he feels.

He feels.. he’s not sure. There’s Darkness everywhere.  He feels like a nerf in a gundark nest, and pulls his Force presence in as tight as he can, making himself smaller, less obvious. It’s all around him, worse than Dooku, worse than the muck and mire of everyday Darkness during the war.  

A com chirps.  “Lord Vader, the damage to the hyperdrives have been repaired.  We are ready to get underway at your command.”

There’s no response.

“Lord Vader?” the voice asks again, cool and impersonal.

“Uh,” Anakin says, and nearly jumps as his voice comes out deep, harsh.  His lungs feel clogged, and he aches all over, not the least of which is the throbbing in his head.

“Lord Vader, are you alright?”

“I’m.. fine.”  Anakin says, not sure of anything at all, and certainly not fine.

“Should…we get underway?”

“Are we in a hurry?” Anakin says it without thinking, a flip remark that his new voice turns into a growling threat.

“N-no sir, of course not. We await your commands, as always.” There’s a moment of awkward silence, then the voice continues,  “Captain Marse, out.”  The com goes dead.

“You are sufficiently recovered to return to duty, Lord Vader,” the droid announces, leaving Anakin at loose ends. But there’s another presence in the murk of Darkness, a light that he recognizes.  Maybe that will get him some answers.

He marches out of the room as if he has every right to be here, wherever here is, and nobody stops him. It’s a starcruiser, he soon finds, but at the same time not.  It’s larger, for one thing.

Narrowing in on the presence isn’t easy, but nobody stops him or even looks him in the eye as he walks past, so he keeps up the purposeful stride and wonders if this is some kind of nightmare or hallucination.  There are clones, or at least troopers, but he doesn’t get the sense that they’re his, and everywhere, there’s the Darkness.

He stops outside a cell that has a guard posted outside, wondering if he’s going to have to knock someone out, but the guard lowers his eyes, and murmurs a respectful  ‘Lord Vader.’

 _Well, that was too easy_ , he thinks as he walks into the cell.

Ahsoka. She’s.. older. Has to be as old as him, or more. Maybe thirty?  It’s hard to tell, under all the blood and bruises, but it’s definitely Ahsoka.  She lifts her head, and the defiant tilt of her chin makes his heart clench. “Ahsoka…”

“You don’t-  get to call me that-  _Vader_.”

“What did they do to you?” he asks, moving forward to free her hands.  She braces, as if for a blow, and Anakin’s stomach drops like a stone. “Ahsoka?”

“What is this, some kind of trick?” she spits as he cracks her cuffs open with the Force.

“Ahsoka, it’s me, Anakin.”

“Bullshit. Nice try though – that’s a different tactic.” She bares her teeth at him. “Or did the knock on your head scramble your brains?” There’s just a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

“You did that?” He asks, accusation and bewilderment in one.

She tries to hit him with one freed hand, and almost succeeds, his aches and pains translating into slower movements.

“Ahsoka, listen to me,” he tries again as he catches her wrists as gently as he can and sits her up again, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to get you out of here. I don’t know how long we have before someone tries to stop me though, so I’m going to need your help.”

“I won’t lead you to the Rebels, you have to know that.” There are tears in her eyes, but her voice is determined, hard.

What Rebels? “I don’t care about any kriffing Rebels, now are you going to walk or do I have to carry you?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I feel like I got trampled by a bantha, I have no damn clue what’s going on, and I am  _extremely_  serious.”

Her eyes narrow.  “If you’re so serious, give me back my lightsabers.”

“Where are they?”

“How the hell should I- this can’t be real.”

“Do you want to escape, or do you want to sit here complaining until whoever’s monitoring the camera notices something’s up.  C’mon Snips-“

This time the hit connects, though he barely feels it through the layers of padding he has on. She looks at him, wild-eyed, hurt and anger radiating in the Force, before she brings it down, smooths it out like she’s a Jedi Knight for real.  “I won’t let you get to me.”

“Okay, fine, but are you going to escape or not? The Ahsoka I knew would have been halfway down the corridor by now.”

“Anakin Skywalker is dead.” He can hear the utter certainty in her voice. “This is a trap.”

“So you’re just going to sit around?”  Anakin’s new voice is harsher than usual with frustration and confusion.

She gives him a hard, cold look.  “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”

“Good to know,” he says, the mechanical voice stripping his words of sarcasm.

This day was just getting better and better.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Picks up right where Ch1 left off. Anakin would like to wake up now.

Anakin wants to take a deep breath to brace himself, but the damn breathing apparatus he’s wearing doesn’t let him. Instead he lets out something the voice-box translates as a growl. He can’t think of any way to explain the voice box to Ahsoka, and he doesn’t think she’s in the mood to listen, so he ignores the suspicious look Ahsoka shoots him, and glares at the door. “We’ll need to knock out the guard, I think – What?”

Ahsoka’s gone from giving him a wary eye to something a little more incredulous. “Just...walk out with me.” She sounds like she can’t believe she’s saying it, like she can’t believe she  _has_  to say it.

If he didn’t already have a headache, this mess would have given him several already. “Walk out with you? Just like that?”

“What,” she scoffs, “like anyone’s going to stop  _you?_ ”

It breaks him a little, breaks the patience and the fragment of sanity he’s somehow kept through the war. “Okay,” Anakin snaps. “Look.” He tries to take a patient breath which is hard because the machine is doing it for him. What is  _with_  that, anyway? “I don’t know who you think I am. I really don’t. I don’t know where I am, I do not know what the fuck is going on.” Dammit, this stupid suit is slowing down his words, too. What the hell. It probably says a lot about the stresses of war and their emotionally numbing effects on him, that he doesn’t even need to work hard to bite down the panic that wants to scrabble up his throat as he starts to seriously consider the whole mess. “All I know is that this ship is drowning in Darkness, and I want you and me both  _off_  of it.” Another forced breath he has no choice about. “Is that good enough for you?”

Ahsoka stares at him. He recognizes elements of the look she finally gives him. It has hints of Obi-Wan’s crueler streak of snark in the eyes, a touch of his own excessive scorn of someone’s lack of intelligence dripping off the words. “You’re Darth Vader.”

“Never heard of him – wait,  _Darth_?” Fuck, he can’t even yelp in this damn suit, and despite this thing he’s got one hell of a chill running through him. “I fucking well am not a...a...”

He can’t even bring himself to say it. He looks down at his hands through the red-tinted visor. Gloves. Full life-support suit, meant for the vacuum of space – except he’s not  _in_  the vacuum of space.

Ahsoka looks to be in her early thirties.

She was sixteen, the last time he’d seen her. When she was walking away from the Temple, shoulders back and head high.

It’s somehow been at least fifteen years, and his Padawan is calling him a Sith Lord.

His breaths want to quicken, pull in oxygen in panic, but he  _can’t_.

Anakin knows he’s always struggled with the Dark side, but he’s...he’s the ‘Chosen One’…and Obi-Wan has always had such _faith_  in him.

“Look.” Anakin tries to regroup again. He will deal with the absolute shock of...of...of whatever this is at a later date. “I will help you get off of this ship. In return, help me find a neutral medical station, some place these...er...whoever these people are, somewhere they can’t or won’t go.”

Snips gives him another suspicious look, like that’s the dumbest ploy she’s heard in years. “Why do you want a medical center?”

“If you woke up in a fucking life support suit with no idea how you got into it, wouldn’t  _you_  want someone to be able to take it off?”

He  _should_  be worried that his voice inside the helmet is getting shrill with exasperation and shock, but the suit modulates his words for the exterior, keeping him from sounding anything but deep and implacable as Mace with a head-cold giving a lecture. The weirdness of that is not helped as Ahsoka opens and closes her mouth a few times, like she wants to say something and is somehow thinking better of saying it. Finally, the prospect of freedom seems to overcome Snips’s complete lack of trust in him, and the desire to snipe.

“If this is a trick,” she growls in a no-nonsense, warning tone, “I will fucking kill you.”

The Force, Dark and murky as it is, rings with her deadly sincerity.

“Apparently, I have been a Sith for fifteen years,” Anakin growls back, still trying not to panic. Not that the breathing machine will let him. “If I start acting like one again, you have my complete and enthusiastic permission to kill me.”

“I don’t  _need_  your permission!” she snarls, baring her teeth.

“Oh, who cares!” Anakin snaps back. Ugh. It’s stupidly hard to emote when his voice always sounds the same. “Follow me,” he says, and is somehow not surprised that he can put his palm on the interior door lock and have it obey him.

The guard outside starts to attention, but he doesn’t try to stop Ahsoka when she follows Anakin out, doesn’t try to stop either of them or do anything to draw attention to himself.

This is rather depressing confirmation of Ahsoka’s claim that Anakin – or – or whoever he used to be, before he woke up – really is in charge around here.

“I don’t suppose I have to remind you to pretend to be a beaten down, defeated prisoner,” Anakin says in a low voice, only half-joking.  At least his stupid voice-box lets him modulate volume.

Ahsoka shoots him an evil look. “It’s not much of a stretch at the moment, is it?”

That kind of annoys him, in a way that’s familiar – he wants to protest that he’s the one getting her  _out_  of here, so how about a little gratitude? At the same time, he can’t escape the uncomfortable feeling that he’s responsible for at least some of the damage, especially if he really is what it looks like he is.

“Um,” he finally says, uncomfortable and lost on so many levels. “Are the flight bays still in the same locations?”

“Oh  _stars_ ,” Ahsoka grumbles and pushes past him. “Follow me and try to pretend you know where we’re going.”

Anakin is pretty sure that if she wasn’t already in the mood to literally kill him, she’d be planning to beat him with a stick later. Never any doubt that this is  _his_  Padawan.

It is almost embarrassing how easy it is to hijack the shiniest looking shuttle in the entire hanger without anyone lifting a hand to stop them. Only one high-ranking officer tries, offering them a hesitant “Lord Vader?” as they stalk past.

“Not now!” Anakin growls as menacingly as possible – which is  _very_ , as it turns out.

The officer backs down immediately, and Anakin has to push down a pang of guilt for terrorizing someone who just seems to be doing their job. Hell, if he tried a stunt like that on the Resilient, he’d have Yularen and the entire Jedi Council climbing down his throat for it, and he suspects they’d be well within their rights to get pissy.

Ahsoka doesn’t seem to know what to do with him just sitting down – awkwardly – in the co-pilot’s seat and letting her set the nav coordinates. The destination she picks isn’t in Separatist space. It’s not really anything he recalls, which is good enough for him. The best part is that it should only be a few hours away, if they’re really where the comp places them.

Why they’re out in the middle of civilized space, smack dab between the Core and Mid-Rim, on one  _hell_  of a star cruiser, is not really a question he’s too comfortable with.

He’s mulling it all over when Ahsoka brusquely ducks into the ’fresher, and he feels so damn confined he doesn’t  _think_  about it. It’s habit, almost need, really. He’s got a few minutes alone – more, to be honest, if she’s going to be reasonably thorough about clearing up some of the blood – so he does what he always does when he’s got a spare few. He shrugs off his right glove, tugging it free, surprised when it slides off instead of him having to run the ritual struggle with the bands keeping it in place. He’s staring down in blank astonishment, when he notices something happening to the damn suit he’s wearing.

Fuck, it’s depressurizing; he can  _feel_  how the air flow is totally wrong, totally off, and he’s swearing in his head because that’s  _all_ he can do. Anakin can barely manage to get himself coordinated enough to slide the glove back on, and when he finally does all he can do is sit in the Force-be-damned co-pilot’s chair, gasping like a landed fish. It takes too long, too  _damned_  long for the suit to recalibrate. He’s still sitting there, wide-eyed and panicked, when Ahsoka comes back.

She doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t even notice.

* * *

 

They get to the medical station pretty quick, but there’s no way it can be fast enough for Anakin. He’s had plenty of time to grow to despise the frigid silence Ahsoka inflicts on him, and his loathing of the damn suit is growing exponentially. He’s managed to piece together that the horror-show of a suit seems to be life support, but what kind of life is very, very questionable. He’s in pain, more pain than should be caused by...whatever fight he came out of. His whole body hurts, except for his limbs, and that’s because Force help him, he doesn’t  _have_  any. It’s not just his right arm; both of them, and his legs are mechanical, and shoddy mechanical, too. It’s both degrading and infuriating that he was repairing higher quality parts back in Watto’s shop as a kid.

Ahsoka might not trust him, but he trusts her, and it pays off. The medical station is run by droids, and a little bit after docking they’re in an examination room with a medbot that’s looking at least several versions beyond the shiniest he’s seen, and he keeps abreast of the damn upgrades. He and Obi-Wan need medical attention too often to not know these things.

By the time he’s through a basic scan or three, he’s itching to get out of the damn suit. They’re medical; they have to know what the fuck is going on with it. When the medical droid gives him that almost mournful, lightly scolding look, he’s ready to claw the suit  _off_ , except then the droid floors him. “I’m afraid that to remove the suit, you need to be in a hyperbaric chamber.”

“What –  _Why?_ ”

There’s a lot of medical lingo getting tossed around, but he’s got enough experience to follow along. Basic scans reveal that his lungs are horribly scarred – “shoddy work, shoddy work, that,” the droid mutters. “It looks like they were never treated at all.  I would dismantle any droid who did such a thing.”

That...doesn’t sound good. It makes his skin crawl even more.

“Can you  _fix_  it?” Anakin demands, voice box making what should be a distressed question into a growled threat.

The droid ponders, not seeming to notice the tone.  “I could strip the first several layers of your skin off to deal with the complex scarring and repair the neural damage that keeps your remaining body in a constant state of pain. The lungs would...possibly need to be subjected to the same thing. Do you desire to retain those low-quality mechanical replacements?”

Anakin's jaw is hanging open, even if the others can’t see it. That does explain why he hurts so fucking much. But if this is fixable, why the fuck is he still in this suit?

Something is  _very_  wrong, and none of it adds up.

“Look. Fix all of it. Everything,” Anakin says, while Ahsoka stares at him in a scowl crossed with disbelief. “I mean, how the hell – if this is all fixable, why am I still in this life support suit with equipment breathing for me?”

“I would not be able to say, sir,” the droid murmurs, still somehow managing to convey disapproval of the very poor quality work. “But if you would like, as you say,  _everything_  to be repaired, that will take at least two weeks of consistent treatment.  It is bound to be painful.”

“Can't hurt any worse than it already does," Anakin sighs, resigned but gratified and near desperate at the prospect of getting free of the damn suit.

“There is a matter of payment –”

That’s the bit Anakin was worried about.  “Uh, wait.”

He digs around in the many belt pouches that seem to be attached to this suit.  Hell, he thinks there’s pockets hidden in the cape, too.  Handy, even if it does look absurd.

The credit chits are completely unrecognizable, so he just dumps the whole lot of them onto the exam table. “Is that enough?”

The droid squeaks.  “Sir!  That is twice the amount I would ask. You will be granted change, but it will have to be in...uh...smaller denominations than this.”

“Fine. Get me the  _hell_  out of this suit.” He’d give up every last one of those credits, and repair mousedroids for a few years if he had to, so long as he got  _rid_  of that thing!

The droid does bring back change, which, while still that new currency, has numbers on it that make more damn sense.  Anakin thinks about it and then gives half to Ahsoka.

“What's  _this_  for?” she asked, eyes narrowing. She’s starting to bristle like he just insulted her virtue  _and_  her ability to levitate small objects for short distances.

“Well, if I give you all of it, and you ditch me, I’ve got no way off this station. If I keep all of it, you keep thinking I’m going to murder you in your sleep. If I give you just enough to leave on your own...”  He looks at her, and it almost breaks something inside of him. His Padawan, grown up,  _older_  than he is, and so damn suspicious of him.  “I’m giving you an out. I don’t actually  _want_  you to go. But there it is. If you’re really terrified of whoever I’m supposed to be, then take a hike, but I gotta tell you, I don’t know who that is. I only know who  _I_  am.”

“And who is  _that_?”

Anakin thinks about it, and it's on the tip of his tongue to just tell her, try to convince her again...but Ahsoka had told him, in complete certainty, that Anakin Skywalker was dead. “You know what?  Let’s wait until I am both out of this suit and possibly more presentable looking, and then maybe I can tell you and have you believe me.” Ahsoka still looks like she’s ready to bolt. Anakin sighs, a noise the vocoder refuses to translate. “Look.  Droid, she needs medical attention, too. Bill me instead of her, but make sure she gets fixed up and maybe gets a bed, all right?  Jedi make better decisions when they’re not falling over from exhaustion.”

“You have no right to speak of Jedi at all!” Ahsoka says in a snarl, hands clenching into fists.

“Well, too bad, because I am a Jedi, and I get to talk about myself all fucking day long if I want to.”

They glare each other down, the way they used to when things were going poorly, and in the end she’s the one who turns away, teeth bared and hands in fists. She makes a bit of a show of going off for treatment, but he can feel the ripples in the Force. He wonders if she really is that close to going Dark just for the chance to kill him with her bare hands.

Anakin shakes his head and turns the damned helmet to the med droid. “Let’s start this now. I want this  _done._ ”


	3. Chapter 3

Ahsoka pays little attention to the droids attending her, instead turning inwards, to the conflicting emotions that twists her stomach up in knots. She knows she’s not doing well: between evading the Imperial bloodhounds for several weeks, fighting Vader in either one long running battle or almost half a dozen small ones, and torture… Well, it has not been a good month. She’d expected her last bit of satisfaction to be the latest escape attempt, when she’d managed to clobber Vader about the head a few times. She’d heard some nice cracking, crunchy noises, though she’d paid for it.

The result doesn’t leave her particularly happy, escaped and not-dead aside. In the end, the need to get away from Vader – instead of trying to kill him with her bare hands – is what makes her get medical attention. She has a lot of time to stew, while the medbots patch her up. On the one hand, she’s almost itching to call some Rebels down on the place.

With a bit of time to calm down, and _without_ having a mad Darth Vader prancing around, a different notion has settled in. She has the greatest bargaining chip the Rebellion has ever seen right there on station with her. If Vader gets himself out of that suit, then he’s vulnerable. If she can suss out Vader’s true identity, she can reduce others’ fear of him – show that not a monster, just another man.

Vulnerable.

Even better, if she can keep him from recovering his memories, then she has also effectively crippled the Emperor’s Jedi hunters, _and_ part of the Imperial Military. The Imperial 501st is good, but Vader _with_ them is what helps make them strong. So she decides to ride this speeder, see where it goes, and find out who this Vader is that he dares to claim to be a Jedi.

It doesn’t burn any less, the lies he spoke about Anakin. She’d felt her master’s essence gutter out in those horrible hours as the Force emptied of Jedi, one more life snuffed out in the growing darkness that birthed the Empire. Despite her leaving the Order, they had not broken the bond between padawan and master. It had shattered that night, without warning.

That had been her first signal that she was alone.

Vader was not, _could_ not be Anakin Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker was dead. She still isn’t sure why Vader would have delusions about that, or why he would think she’d listen. Perhaps it was misaligned memories. Given who she is, and that she was there when his brains got scrambled, maybe he latched onto her, and some twisted part of his mind wanted to be the hero instead of the villain.

Whatever the answer is, she _will_ get it.

All she has to do is wait.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for Ahsoka to be bored. A neutral med station is discreet, and quiet, and it doesn’t take her long to heal. A few days into the estimated two weeks, she sneaks into Vader’s room. There’s a bacta tank there, containing a limbless, armless form unrecognizable under so many breathing apparati and tubes and she has no idea what else.

He looks human enough, though she can’t make out more than the basic form. Before she can get too close, close enough to try to see around the medical equipment and make out who Vader is, a droid gets in her way. He’s polite enough asking her to leave, but insistent that Vader is highly vulnerable to infection during the process and that her presence is an unacceptable risk.

She stands outside the door, exchanging looks with the security droid that moves in to block her way. She could push, she could even win. But Vader was the one who decided, of his own initiative, that he needed to get out of that suit – Ahsoka only has to wait, and he will come to her. Part of her is guiltily relieved at her own logic; insane as he is, Vader still trusted her. Ahsoka is the one to move away first, her hands clenching in and out of fists as she tries to grasp what she’s seen. The great and terrifying Darth Vader, unconscious and vulnerable and _hurt_ , twitching in the bacta as if the healing process is as painful as described, if not more. She has no idea what to think about the fact that the most terrifying man in the Empire outside of Sidious is a wreck of a human with no limbs to speak of. It’s one thing to hear a cold, clinical assessment about shoddy replacement limbs and horrible scarring, but the pathetic figure in the bacta tank has nothing to do with the living nightmare that has hunted Jedi, hunted _her_ for years.

As Vader’s...accomplice, at least as far as the medical bots are concerned, his belongings are brought to her. She shoves the armor and dramatic cape – all reeking of Darkness – into a storage locker.

The prosthetic limbs she studies, before storing them as well. She can’t figure out how that pile of organic parts, who is effectively second in line for the throne, would be given such...such foul treatment. These bionics are shoddy even by hurried Clone Wars standards.

When she finds herself wondering what Vader will think about the new synth-skin components, all she can do is snarl and try to work off the stress in the station’s rehabilitation gym. She spends hours mad at herself for thinking any such thing at all.

Ahsoka does not like at all the fact that she's starting to view Darth Vader as anything other than the monster he is.

* * *

The security droid remains on guard for the rest of the week and a half. Ahsoka gets regular progress reports; she tries to keep her emotions at arm’s length as she scan details about at least four different infections and several critical system crashes, despite all the care taken. It’s a miracle that they manage to get Vader back each time, and she has to wonder what he’ll think when he finds out how many times he died in the recovery process.

She takes time to meditate on the matter. It helps that she has a lot of time to meditate, because it takes her a damn long while to come to terms with the mess. Vader has killed...so very, very many Jedi. Yet out of that damned nightmare suit, he’s human and vulnerable. For Ahsoka, that’s a double-edged sword. He’s not an unstoppable force of nature anymore. She can’t deny the fact that he’s just a human, just a person.

Far too much meditation is spent trying to figure out what could drive a being to destroy the entire Jedi Order, and the only answer she can find involves madness. Not even the Dark side could just...just _revel_ in that sort of mass destruction, could it?

* * *

For the first time in fifteen years, Ahsoka isn’t on the run. She can catch her breath, meditate, let as much of the Darker emotions go as she can manage. She makes cautious contact with her Rebel allies, letting them know that in spite of the impossible odds, she lives and has a lead. They don’t trust it; _won’t_ trust it until she can contact uncompromised agents face to face, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. That sort of caution is why the Rebellion survives, in spite of Palpatine’s many efforts to crush it.

She is meditating before a bay window when Vader finally comes to her. She has her back to the corridor, eyes closed to the quiet splendor of the stars. She can feel that close-shielded presence approach her, until there’s the sounds of a man sitting next to – but not right next to – her.

She scowls, the peace of her meditation broken. “What, now you’ve come to stab me?”

“Not in a million years.”

Her eyes fly open, and she stares. She cannot breathe, she cannot believe any of her senses. The voice is hoarser than she recalls, but given the damage that’s no surprise. Age has added lines, thickened the face somewhat. There’s a lot more scarring, but it’s not bad, honestly, considering some of the battle damage she’s seen during the war, and over the years. There’s just a bit of fluff of really dark hair growing on his head and the faintest impression of eyebrows where they hadn’t grown back in yet, but...

“Skyguy?” she croaks, as the shields flex enough that she can see through them, see _Anakin_ underneath them.

“Looks that way,” he says, with that tiny, wry grin he got when things weren’t funny but they needed to crack wise anyways.

“Are – are you a clone?” she manages to stammer out, clutching her wrists because otherwise she’s not sure if she’d hug the hell out of the man or just go Dark and try to kill this impossible monstrosity that could not be. Oh, Force help her, let it not be. If Darth Vader– if _Anakin_ – !

 _Please_ , let it not be.

He looks down at his right hand before answering, some indecipherable expression wiping the humorless grin away. “If I am, then someone took the time to give me memories, as far as I can tell _all_ of the memories of Anakin Skywalker until– until the Battle for Coruscant.” His hand closes into a fist, distress verging on despair sweeping over his face. “I remember...I remember fighting Dooku and then...a few flashes. Almost crashing a ship. Padme looking worried, Obi-Wan smiling. Then nothing.” It’s pretty clear he’s struggling to hide panic. “I’ve been– I had the chance to read some feeds, the– this new Imperial History bullshit, and–” Anakin’s distress is becoming more pronounced, visible in the Force and strong enough to make Ahsoka’s stomach sour. “It’s everyone? They’re _all_ dead?”

She stares at him. There are some things that cannot be faked, and her Master had never been good at dissembling, ever. Obi-Wan had made fun of him for it all the time.

Vader had never bothered with any such thing. He had felt no _need_ to hide.

 _I don't know what to do_ , Ahsoka thinks, blank and numb, frozen with shock.

“I mean,” Anakin stares at her. “You’re still alive. I mean, is Obi-Wan? Please don’t say no. I don’t...oh, gods, Snips.”

 _I don't know what to do_ , Ahsoka thinks again, _but I know someone who will_.

She hesitantly puts her hand on Anakin’s arm. It feels like him, despite the mechanical interface. This is her Master’s aura. It was no more Dark now than it had been during the war.

“I’ll take you to him.”


End file.
